The next morning, with the same train by which Frederick had come, Miss Burns arrived in Meriden. She went directly to Peter Schmidt's office to inquire for him, having expected to find him awaiting her at the station. Peter told her of the operation Frederick had performed the day before.
"It was a mighty difficult job, I tell you," said Peter Schmidt, "and he covered himself with glory. He intended immediately afterwards to send you a telegram telling you not to come. But just as he was about to go, he himself received a cablegram."
"Well, now that I am here," said Miss Burns in her sprightly way, "I shall not allow myself to be turned down in such an offhand manner. I don't intend to visit Rome without seeing the Pope."
Three quarters of an hour later the two-seated sleigh drawn by the spirited chestnut, with whose peculiarities they now knew better how to deal, reached Uncle Tom's Cabin on Lake Hanover. Peter, who was anxious to bring Frederick news of the farmer and tell him he had not developed fever, drove Miss Burns out. They were amazed at the condition in which they found things, and, as they mounted the stairs, freely exchanged criticisms without lowering their voices. The door to Frederick's room was slightly ajar. They walked in. He was lying stretched on his bed, still wearing the fur coat in which he had left the office after the operation. He was unconscious, mumbling in a delirium, evidently very ill. Peter Schmidt picked up the cablegram lying on the floor. He and Miss Burns felt that in the circumstances they were justified in learning its contents. What they read was:
Dear Frederick, news from Jena. In spite of the greatest care Angèle passed away yesterday afternoon. Take the inevitable with composure. Keep yourself well for your loving old parents.
For a week Frederick hovered between life and death. The powers of darkness, perhaps, had never grappled for him so greedily. For a week his whole body was like something about which tongues of fire lick and roar, ready to consume it and send it up into the air, like a puff of smoke.
Peter Schmidt, of course, brought all his medical skill to his friend's service. Mrs. Schmidt, too, did whatever she could for him. Miss Burns felt it was predestination, not chance, that had brought her to his side at so critical a moment, and instantly decided not to leave until he was entirely out of danger. She engaged a woman attendant and a man to go on errands by day and night.
The terrible frenzy in which Frederick had been the night before was apparent from the way in which things had been thrown about. The glass of his seaman's clock on the wall was broken, and dishes were shivered to bits. Peter Schmidt's diagnosis was typhoid fever. The first two days and nights he did not leave Frederick's side, except when his wife took his place. The paroxysms repeated themselves. Memories of the shipwreck still tormented him, and at certain hours he would tell his attendants, whom he did not recognise, to look in a corner of the room, where, he said, a black spider, the size of a bowling ball, was lying in wait for him. Peter and his wife with extreme caution applied all the means at a physician's disposal to reduce his temperature; but the third day passed, and still it did not fall below 105.8°. Peter grew graver and graver. Finally, however, the fever curve showed declinations, and by the end of a week its downward course remained pretty constant.
Frederick looked like a pale, empty, incombustible husk, inside of which a great auto-da-fé had taken place. What a wild orgy salamander-like creatures must have been holding behind his sweaty forehead. Countless times, by the most different methods, Angèle murdered Ingigerd and Ingigerd Angèle. His father, the general, fought a pistol duel with Mr. Garry, Captain von Kessel acting as second and measuring the distance. Doctor Wilhelm kept rising again and again from beneath the raging chaos in his soul. Ten or twenty times he brought him a human embryo wrapped in paper, and said:
"To live is good. Not to live is better."
Hans Füllenberg had to leave his hiding-place and join in the gruesome, grotesque dance to death. Sometimes it seemed as if a puff of burning air swept all these figures into an oven to destroy them forever.
Something like the dizzy movement of the sea kept tossing up and down. He was carried aloft—his consciousness left him. He sank deep down—again his consciousness left him. He flew—he lost his sense of ponderosity. High on the crest of this cosmic, immaterial swell, he suffered constantly from nausea. In his lucid moments he said to himself:
"The ocean does not wish me to be saved. It kept me alive just to display the full extent of its powers and draw me down from my security."
He had dreams of tremendous cosmic proportions, showing he had images of a might and power far exceeding the sane, normal strength of conception, with no precedent for them in experience. Even when the life-boat with its small load of castaways, shrieking, praying, or unconscious, was dancing on the great broad swells of the heavy, mineral ocean, Frederick had had no such feeling of the microscopic minuteness of his personality.
At the end of the first week he recognised Miss Burns and began to understand what she had done for him. He smiled with difficulty and made signs with his hand lying limply on the bedspread.
It was not until the end of the second week, the twenty-sixth of March, that the fever left him entirely. He spoke, slept, had vivid dreams. In a tired voice and sometimes with a touch of humour, he told of the wild things that had passed through his brain. He expressed desires, showed gratitude, inquired for the farmer on whom he had operated, and smiled when Peter told him the wound had healed promptly and the farmer had driven out to bring some guinea-fowls for bouillon.
Miss Burns's management of the household was exemplary. Such considerate, ever-ready ministrations as Frederick received do not fall to the lot of many men. Physicians like Peter and his wife are not, of course, prone to prudery. Neither was Miss Burns, with her strong arms and sculptor hands, which were accustomed to modelling from life. Though her manner was calm and composed, there was secret passion and a strong maternal instinct in her nursing. She seemed to have found her true vocation.
At her bidding Peter sent cablegrams to Frederick's parents, keeping them informed of his condition, and notifying them when he was pronounced out of danger. With the request that it be held for him until his health was restored, she returned a thick letter from the general written before Frederick was taken ill, correctly assuming that it contained details of his wife's tragic end. She knew that by keeping the letter, she might be tempted to betray its existence to the sick man and would then find it too hard to prevent him from reading it. At the beginning of the fourth week, she received a letter from the old general, in which he thanked her and the two doctors from the depths of his heart for all they had done for his son.
"I may tell you," he wrote, "that poor Angèle did not die a natural death. At the institution, they knew she needed the strictest watching, but, unfortunately, even with the greatest care, there are moments when a patient is not observed. It was one of those moments that Angèle seized to take poison, one of the poisons that are frequently used and are not kept under lock and key."
The snow had melted away. Slowly, slowly Frederick adjusted himself to life again. There was a mildness in him like the mildness of nature outside his window. It was a surprisingly sweet experience. The world seemed to be granting him indulgence. Lying on his clean bed, with the little pewter sailing vessels on the old seaman's clock ticking to and fro, he had a sense of security and, what is more, a sense of rejuvenation, of having expiated and received pardon. From torrid black clouds, a storm had come with thunder and lightning to cleanse the air. It was still rumbling on the distance horizon, farther and farther away, never to return again, leaving behind in the weak man a rich, full, peaceful joy in life.
"A cure of force, a violent eruption and revolution has purged your body of all poisons and putrid matter," said Peter Schmidt.